Almost 2,000 years ago, a Roman soldier of Celtiberian origin completed his military service at the northernmost edge of the Empire and set out on the long journey home to the lands that today make up the Castilian-Leonese province of Soria, in Spain.
In his luggage he carried more than souvenirs: a small, exquisite enamelled bronze cup that reproduced, in miniature, the most remote frontier in which he had served.
This piece, found by chance centuries later in Berlanga del Duero, is today the subject of a study published in the journal Britannia by a team of researchers with the participation of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) and the Museo Arqueológico Nacional (National Archaeological Museum). It is the so-called ‘Berlanga cup’, and its history partly rewrites what was known about one of the most fascinating objects of the Roman world.
A unique piece
Hadrian’s Wall is one of the most famous constructions of antiquity: a 117km defensive wall that Emperor Hadrian erected between 122 AD and 128 AD to protect the Roman province of Britain from raids by the Picts, the indigenous people who inhabited the northern British Isles.
What few know is that there were commemorative bowls associated with this frontier: enamel-decorated bronze hemispherical bowls depicting the wall through a frieze of turrets, with the names of the forts along the wall engraved on the top rim.
Until now, five of these pieces were known in the world, plus two fragments.
The first appeared exactly three centuries ago, in 1725, in a small village in England called Rudge Coppice, near Froxfield. Since then, two more cups have been found in England, one in France, and one fragment in the Iberian Peninsula, discovered in the 19th century and now kept in London. All of these mentioned only the forts of the west-central sector of the Wall.
The cup found in Berlanga del Duero changes this picture substantially. It is the only piece in the entire series that includes the inscriptions of the military camps in the eastern sector: Cilurnum (present-day Chesters, in Northumberland), Onno (Halton Chesters), Vindobala (Rudchester) and Condercom (Benwell). None of the other known cups mention these forts, making the Soria piece an unprecedented contribution to archaeological knowledge of the Wall.
Fragmented but almost complete
The cup was found to be fractured, deformed and incomplete, but it retains between 80-90% of its original volume, which has allowed it to be virtually reconstructed with extraordinary precision.
The research team made a digital twin of the four preserved fragments and processed the images by photogrammetry with Agisoft Metashape software. The result is a high-resolution three-dimensional reproduction that made it possible to determine the exact dimensions of the original piece: 11.34 cm in diameter at the mouth, 4.95 cm at the base and 7.89 cm in height.
With these measurements, the Berlanga cup is the largest of the entire series, surpassing the famous Rudge cup, the Amiens Pátera and the Ilam Pátera by more than three centimetres.
Its decoration is equally striking: three horizontal friezes enamelled in red, green, turquoise and navy blue reproduce the profile of the Wall with its crenellated turrets, while the Latin inscription runs along the top edge of the piece in 5.5-millimetre letters filled with glass paste.
An additional curiosity is the arrangement of the names in the inscription: they are arranged from west to east, as if the observer were looking at the Wall from its inner side, i.e. from the Roman side.
Researchers point out that this constitutes an unprecedented reading of the orientation of these commemorative cups.
Made in Britain
To determine the origin and exact date of manufacture, the team carried out compositional analysis using portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and lead isotope analysis at Durham University’s geochemistry laboratory.
The results reveal that the cup is made of a quaternary alloy, zinc-lead bronze, characteristic of 2nd century AD metal artefacts from Britannia, where this type of alloy accounted for 30-40% of the pieces analysed.
Isotopic analysis of the lead, processed using the AMALIA algorithm, points to mines in northern England or Wales as the most likely origin of the metal: specifically, the mines of the North Pennines, Durham or Wales.The geographical proximity of the Durham and Pennine mines to Hadrian’s Wall itself reinforces the hypothesis of local manufacture in Britain.
By combining this technical data with historical information about the forts mentioned in the inscription, the team has been able to date the piece with remarkable accuracy: between 124 and 150 AD.
A soldier’s return to Celtiberia
So, how did this cup, made in the far north of Britannia, reach a farm in Soria? The answer proposed by the researchers has all the historical coherence of an adventure novel.
The piece would have travelled almost two thousand kilometres in the hands of an old soldier who was returning to his homeland: Roman Celtiberia, a region that covered a large part of what is now the province of Soria and parts of La Rioja, Zaragoza, Guadalajara, Teruel and Cuenca.
The decisive clue is provided by the Roman military history itself. The Romans systematically incorporated troops from conquered territories into their army, and it is known that a Celtiberian unit, the Cohors I Celtiberorum, actually served on Hadrian’s Wall.
“We know that the Romans incorporated troops from recently conquered territories into their army and that a Celtiberian unit served at Hadrian’s Wall,” says Roberto de Pablo, first author of the study and researcher at the CAETRA Institute in Berlanga de Duero.
The researchers interpret the cup, like the rest of the series, as a prestige object made to order as a gift or decoration for the military elite who had served on the frontier.
“The quality of craftsmanship and the materials used in these cups tell us that they were prestige objects, most probably made as gifts or to decorate the military elite who had served on Hadrian’s Wall, the farthest frontier of the Empire,” explains Jesús García Sánchez, a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology in Mérida, a joint centre of the CSIC and the Regional Government of Extremadura.
“Most researchers, and we too, agree in interpreting them as a reminder of the Wall”, he adds.
A Roman villa under the fields of Berlanga
The discovery of the cup also triggered an archaeological prospecting campaign in the area known as La Cerrada del Arroyo, just a few hundred metres from the centre of Berlanga del Duero. The work, which combined surface prospecting, ground penetrating radar (GPR) and analysis of historical aerial photographs, brought to light something unexpected: the remains of a small group of buildings belonging to a Roman villa that was active between the 1st century AD and the 4th century AD.
Ground penetrating radaridentified at least one rectangular building approximately 17 metres long by 14 metres wide, with several rooms on both sides of the main axis and remains of preserved paving in one of the rooms. To the south of this building, the researchers located a room with an apse and a small annex probably divided into two rooms.
According to the authors, the ensemble points to the corner of a larger rural complex whose agricultural function would have evolved over the centuries with the incorporation of new architectural elements.
The Berlanga goblet has the honour of being the second piece of this extremely rare series found on the Iberian Peninsula, after the 19th-century fragment preserved in London, and the only one that will remain in Spain.
The piece, inventoried with the code 2025/3, is currently deposited in the Numantine Museum of Soria, where it is undergoing restoration work prior to its exhibition to the public.